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Jessica Ancker Photo
Jessica Ancker, PhD, MPH, FACMI
Co-Lead CDSiC Trust and Patient-Centeredness Workgroup

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Jessica Ancker, PhD, MPH, FACMI, is a tenured professor in the departments of biomedical informatics and health policy at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. One of her primary areas of research is how information design can improve comprehension and decisions. Her Making Numbers Meaningful project, funded by the National Library of Medicine, supported a cross-disciplinary integration of experimental and quasi-experimental literature to develop evidence on how to communicate data to patients through numbers, words, and graphics. This work is critical for patient-facing innovations such as decision aids, patient portals, and consumer health information technologies. Her second major research portfolio involves evaluating the effects of health information technology innovation and policy by applying health services research methods to large electronic health record and claims data sets. For example, she has been funded by PCORI to study the comparative effectiveness of telehealth and in-person primary care during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Finally, her “nudge” portfolio combines her other interests to develop unobtrusive and highly effective informatics interventions that improve healthcare quality and equity. She has helped implement and evaluate EHR-based nudges that have led to substantive improvements in opioid prescribing quality, adoption of generic rather than brand name drugs, and patient portal uptake. In a new PCORI project, her team is exploring how these approaches can be applied to streamline the conduct of clinical trials. As vice chair for education in the country’s largest biomedical informatics department, she teaches biomedical informatics methods to PhD students and oversees training programs for graduate students, medical students, clinical informatics fellows, undergraduate research interns, and applied clinical informaticists.